With this in mind, I thought I'd create the most export-unfriendly Magic card imaginable, a card which couldn't possibly be passed by the Beijing censors. So here it is.
Personally, I find this sort of thing funny. Although I can see how its comic appeal might be rather limited, since it doesn't make sense unless (a) you know about the aforementioned no-skeletons rule, and (b) you have a reasonable understanding of international politics. Magic players aren't, on the whole, well-versed in global affairs. We tend to have a better grasp of where Urborg is than of where Eritrea is. However, I don't want to talk about politics, or skeletons, or even genitals, for once. I want to talk about the business of faking Magic cards.
Many, many years ago, I read a magazine article in which a journalist tried to make a perfect copy of a McDonald's Big Mac in his own kitchen, with exactly the same balance of mechanically-recovered cow-guts and semi-vegetable slurry. Getting the taste right wasn't difficult, but when it came to the presentation, he fell at the first hurdle: no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't make the sesame seeds on top of the burger look as randomly-scattered as they do on a real Big Mac. Because as any forger will tell you, it's not the big things that trip you up, it's the tiny, fiddly details. Those petty, almost below-the-radar little points that tug at your instincts and tell you when something's just wrong.
With that in mind, consider the Drudge Democracy Protestor. Even if it had proper artwork (rather than a manky felt-tip cartoon), even if it had a proper artist's credit (rather than the artist's name that happened to be on the card I used as a template), even if it had a proper expansion symbol (rather than an upside-down, unlucky-horseshoe version of the one from Unhinged), and even if it didn't wildly overuse the word "skeleton"at every opportunity... even then, you'd still be able to tell it was a fake. It's the text, isn't it? No bona fide Magic card would have text like that. It's the right typeface, but ohhhh, just look at the spacing. The "k"s are much too close to the "e"s, the "e"s are too close to the "n"s. It's a difference of mere pixels, but as with the sesame seeds, it's enough to tip you off at a glance. Not even Donald Pleasance in The Great Escape would be able to foresee a thing like that.
This isn't the first time I've tried to fake a Magic card. The first time was in 1994, when Legends still seemed shiny and new and exciting rather than awkward and overpriced and full of Kobolds. Now, you have to understand... when I say faking, I mean "making a brand-new card that might actually fool people", not "making counterfeit copies of cards that already exist". There was a glut of counterfeit cards in the UK circa 1994-95, although most of them were just colour photocopies of rare Legends stuck onto Atogs. We were knee-deep in Atogs, in those days. Thirteen years on, this sort of illegal card-cloning is hard to understand, for various reasons. Firstly, it seems bizarre that anyone could have been fooled by the counterfeits for more than a few seconds (but then, in the early days of Magic, the print-quality of real cards was hugely variable... some Unlimited cards were barely even legible). Secondly, it seems bizarre that the card-pirates would bother to make copies of cards from a set that wasn't even four months old, rather than concentrating on the Mox end of the market (but Magic was a rarer commodity then, and it makes more sense when you remember that Legends sold out within two days of reaching Britain). Thirdly, it seems bizarre that the fake Legends tended to be clunky multicoloured creatures rather than anything useful like a Moat or a Mana Drain (but this was a more romantic age). Fourthly, it seems bizarre that anyone would rather have a Ramirez DePietro than an Atog (but that's youth).
No, no, no. This cheap, shameless kind of fakery was of no interest to myself and my like-minded associates. We wanted to create a card, to make something wholly absurd and then see if we could play it in a game without the opponent noticing that anything was wrong. Remember, it was less than a year since the game had arrived in the UK, a time when it was much easier to accept A Card You've Never Heard Of. In 1994, almost nobody had a 100%-complete Magic checklist. There were no magazines dedicated to the art of trading-card foppery, and hardly anyone outside of a university was on-line. For the first year or so, we simply didn't know how many different Magic cards there were in the world. My life in Magic began when someone - his identity has never become clear - left a plastic bag full of cards in a local off-license. An acquaintance of mine found them, and came 'round to my house to try them out. Faced with a huge assortment of creatures, lands and "mono artifacts", we could only make guesses at the size of this odd new cardboard universe. We concluded that in order for the game to work, there had to be at least a thousand cards in the set (there weren't... at that stage, there were less than five-hundred), and that a complete checklist would be almost impossible to assemble. The idea of A Card You've Never Heard Of wasn't just feasible, it was expected.
(Incidentally, I've always had my suspicions about the individual who left the cards in the off-license. For one thing, who leaves bags of trading-cards in shops, even accidentally? For another, why did he never go back and look for them? Even at the time, many of the cards were valuable, some of them discontinued. True, the rarest of them was a Lich rather than a Black Lotus, but even so... the fact remains that because he left his card-stash amongst the Cinzano bottles, two people immediately started playing Magic. Because we started playing Magic, the game infected at least half a dozen others, and probably spread outwards from there. Over the past thirteen years, those people must have spent thousands of pounds on card games, most of them published by the same company. You can see why I'm suspicious. Was that mystery-man a London-based agent for Wizards of the Coast, whose job was to leave "bait" in the vicinity of people who looked like potential gamers? Or possibly an agent of the nearest games shop, hanging around in places where teenagers are likely to be found, in much the same way that drug dealers are supposed to hang around outside secondary schools? After all, what's the price of a Lich compared to the long-term pay-off? You may mock, but I've heard stranger marketing strategies. It's certainly more effective than dressing up as a hot dog and giving out leaflets.)
In the early 1990s, forging your own card was harder than it might now seem. We'd never even heard of PhotoShop, so cut-and-paste meant actual cutting (with scissors) and actual pasting (with Prit-Stick). We realised, right from the start, that we could only make convincing Magic cards by re-assembling bits of other cards. And there was a colour photocopier in the local library, so I took along a clutch of well-known black spells and used them to create the Perfect Beast. Then, just like the "evil" card-pirates, I stuck the finished product onto the face of an unwanted common. An Unlimited-edition Dwarven Warrior, in this case, because the printing on it was awful and it was getting on my nerves.
The resultant atrocity looked something like this (although obviously, I've only just added the silver border):
Stats of a Lord of the Pit, rules text of an old-style Pestilence, an obvious cutting from Plague Rats, plus a picture cribbed from the front of a comic-book. Comic-book experts might now like to waste a small portion of their lives trying to figure out which one.
The first thing to point out about the Fake Plague Lord is that he's in no way related to the later Phyrexian Plaguelord (Urza vintage, 1999), who looks positively rational by comparison. But the more obvious points are that he's strikingly cheap for a 7/7 Pestilence-on-legs - look, it's not as if we really understood how cards were priced in those days, all right? - and that the text doesn't make a lot of sense. You don't discard / destroy him "if there are no other creatures in play", but "if there are no creatures in play", meaning that the Plague Lord is destroyed if... he's destroyed. This may well be the most redundant rules text of all time.
Bearing in mind these fairly obvious problems, would this monstrosity really be able to fool the average player in 1994...? Yes, of course it would. There were a lot of absurdly-priced cards in the game at that stage, and in the days before R&D tested everything to destruction, there were plenty of spells that didn't make sense. Need we consider the original Legends version of Blood Lust, with a text-box that read "target creatures get +4/-4" instead of "target creature gets +4/-4"? For a while, we seriously thought that Blood Lust could affect any number of creatures at the same time. Someone eventually discovered the truth by logging on to this newfangled thing called the internet and looking at the errata list, but there was a fortnight or so in which everybody played it the "wrong" way, and all goblin decks won on the fourth turn. So a little glitch like a card that said "no creatures", when it clearly meant "no other creatures", didn't seem like a big deal.
Except... the sesame seeds. In this case, the feel of the card was the killer. Nothing else on Earth has the exact weight and texture of what we used to call a "Deckmaster card". Plague Lord certainly didn't. Amusingly, the exact makeup of the cardboard used in Magic is now regarded by Wizards of the Coast as a Kentucky Fried Chicken-style secret recipe, and you're not going to get the same effect even if you stick a piece of paper to a Dwarven Warrior. We tried spraying the Lord with Letracote, a product that gives cardboard a glossy plastic finish, but it just wasn't the same. Furthermore, it didn't have the smell of the genuine article. The smell of Magic has always been an important factor in its success: smell is the most evocative sense we have, the most powerful trigger for the human memory, and the subconscious association between "newly-opened booster smell" and "getting a nice surprise, or at least a great big rare dragon" is the kind of thing that would have fascinated Pavlov. (Note that the keyword here is subconscious, since the effect of the smell is rarely acknowledged by the user / addict. This is what led many of the early Magic players to speculate that Wizards of the Coast were putting a trace amount of cocaine inside every booster, to give the consumer an addictive rush when it was opened, although it's got to be said that the people who suggested this theory had no experience of cocaine whatsoever.)
Yet despite all these things, and however improbable it may seem today... in the post-Legends era, the Plague Lord still managed to make it into play without anybody complaining. This was technically cheating on my part, although I'd like to point out that it wasn't a desperate attempt to win the game with a broken card - yes, I know now that it's wildly overpowered, but I didn't then - as much as it was a desperate attempt to get away with something very, very unlikely. I usually did get away with it. Whenever anyone asked why the Plague Lord was oddly discoloured and felt wrong to the touch, I'd explain that it was a "test card", hence the slightly glitchy rules text. This usually satisfied the opponent, who tended to assume that "test card" meant "a card from the earliest test edition of the game", whereas in fact it meant "a test of my ability to use a photocopier and some Prit-Stick". Today, it's hard to make younger players understand just how naïve we all were in the early days of the game, and just how much innocence Magic lost in the period between 1994 and 1995. Somewhere in the span of time between Antiquities and The Dark, checklists became mandatory; "rare", "uncommon" and "common" became accepted as official terms, rather than rough approximations of how often you'd seen a particular card; and Magic became, in a word, finite.
As early as 1996, Richard Garfield lamented the fact that the boundaries of the game had become so well-known, although he accepted that it was inevitable given Magic's success. Personally, I'm just sorry that we now have a gamescape in which there's no point trying to fake cards, because it's no longer possible to surprise anyone. Modern Magic players have special implants that download all the latest spoiler-lists directly into their nervous systems. As ever, it's not that I want to cheat, it's just that... I want to see how ridiculous I can get without anybody spotting the problem. These days, however, even ridiculous cards have an official status (in Unglued and Unhinged). The Drudge Democracy Protestor is positively reasonable, compared to some. The one consolation is that thanks to PhotoShop, we can at least make wholly fraudulent cards in the comfort of our own homes rather than looking suspicious by sitting in the middle of a library with a big pair of scissors.
There are two postscripts to this. The first is that once I'd got bored of playing with the Plague Lord, I put it in my stack of rare trades, where unwary new players would often come across it and stare at it for hours on end. One day I was offered £40 for it, by a collector who automatically assumed that it had to be some kind of rare early-edition card. I declined his offer; making a profit from it would really have been cheating. I have no qualms about stealing from greedy, corrupt or rude people (I see no moral problem with shoplifting from Tesco's, for example), but there was a higher principle at stake. Committing a Magic fraud for money, rather than for the sake of entertainment, is just against the way of things.
And I notice that the illustrator credit on the Drudge Democracy Protestor reads "Glenn Fabry". This is purely because the card I used as a template, Restless Bones, has a Fabry illustration. However, it's fitting that it's credited to the one Magic artist I've actually come into contact with. The first time I met Glenn Fabry was in the early 1990s, when I interviewed him for a fanzine about his 2000 AD work, and he talked quite freely about his notorious behaviour when drunk. The second time I met him was in the actual year 2000 AD, when he was hanging around the bar at a comics convention, as inebriated as I've ever seen a man. It's probably an insult to Glenn to suggest that the manky skeleton cartoon on Drudge Democracy Protestor might be his work, and yet I like the thought that if he should ever come across it while browsing the internet, he might still find himself thinking: 'Is that one of mine? Jesus, what was I drinking that day...?'
